title: Masking release due to linguistic and phonetic dissimilarity between the target and masker speech.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To investigate masking release for speech maskers for linguistically and phonetically close (English and Dutch) and distant (English and Mandarin) language pairs.
  
  
  METHODS
  Thirty-two monolingual speakers of English with normal audiometric thresholds participated in the study. Data are reported for an English sentence recognition task in English and for Dutch and Mandarin competing speech maskers (Experiment 1) and noise maskers (Experiment 2) that were matched either to the long-term average speech spectra or to the temporal modulations of the speech maskers from Experiment 1.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Listener performance increased as the target-to-masker linguistic distance increased (English-in-English < English-in-Dutch < English-in-Mandarin).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Spectral differences between maskers can account for some, but not all, of the variation in performance between maskers; however, temporal differences did not seem to play a significant role.
authors.affiliation: Queens College of the City University of New York, Flushing, USA. lauren_calandruccio@med.unc.edu
authors.forename: Lauren
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Calandruccio
authors.forename: Susanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Brouwer
authors.forename: Kristin J
authors.initials: KJ
authors.lastname: Van Engen
authors.forename: Sumitrajit
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dhar
authors.forename: Ann R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Bradlow
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: masking; native and nonnative English speech perception